Issue Position: Education

Issue Position

EDUCATION THAT IS "FREE" AND "COMPULSORY" IS A BIT OF AN OXYMORON

In 1932, there 128,000 school districts in the United States, and education--even public school education--worked pretty well. Education was done in English, even though the schools were dealing with a great many immigrants for whom English was a second language.

Today there are fewer than 15,000 school districts and we have a plethora of evidence that the centralization, consolidation and interventions by the U.S. Department of Education (DOEd) have not contributed to higher levels of student achievement. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

Despite more and more spending on education and the deliberate dumbing-down of the curricula, student performance continues to falter.

ABOUT 30 CENTS OF EVERY DOLLAR COLLECTED BY THE STATE OF MINNESOTA IS SPENT ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

For Fiscal Years 2010-11, the State of Minnesota budgeted $9.1 billion for K-12 education. For 2012-13, that number rises to $11.2 billion, and for 2014-15, the allocation rises yet again to over $12 billion. That makes public K-12 the largest single line-item in the state's budget (at about 30 percent of the total).

IN 2011, THE NUMBER OF CHILDREN ENROLLED IN MINNESOTA'S K-12 PUBLIC SCHOOLS WAS ABOUT 824,800, SO SPENDING WAS ABOUT $11,300 PER-STUDENT

This number seems pretty big, but the real number is likely even bigger. Studies done by independent think-tanks have found that real spending per-student is higher--sometimes considerably higher. That is because the annual budgetary figure may involve transfers, distributions or other accounting "tricks" that conceal some or all of the capital expenses or debt service on education.

Also, since health and retirement benefits are recorded in the budget on a cash basis--that is, the amount that is expected to be paid only in the current fiscal year--the true cost of the unfunded liabilities for teacher and administrator health and retirement benefits is never shown in a way easily accessible to the taxpayer.

So, it is quite likely that the actual cost to the taxpayer of K-12 education in Minnesota is closer to $14,000 per student (in 2010-2011) than the $11,033 reported in the budget.

WHY DOES PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION FAIL TO HELP OUR STUDENTS ACHIEVE OUTSTANDING RESULTS?

There is no one answer to that question, but there are number of demonstrated contributors to the failure of public education. Here are a few:

*Lack of competition -- Public schools have no urgency to improve their results. They do not compete in any meaningful way with anyone else for the substantial amounts of money that they get from the taxpayer.

*Public sector union (teachers unions) rules do not allow schools to keep and reward the best teachers. Instead, union rules generally require teacher staff to be handled under a LIFO (last-in, first-out) rule. That is, the last teach hired must be the first to laid-off regardless of the quality of the teacher. It makes no difference if the teacher in question is the best teacher the school had ever had, if he or she was the last hired, then he or she must also be the first to go if teachers must be laid-off.

*Parents do not get to choose the best schools for their children. Even so-called "open enrollment" is of little consequence to improving student achievement if the choices the parents have for schools is only between bad and worse. (See number 2 above.)

*Government centralization of public school education and unionization has virtually eliminated any meaningful local control. Even parents who want to be involved in their children's education in order to seek and find ways to improve results get discouraged because of the limitations imposed by the federal and state bureaucracies that govern so much of what happens in the schools and school districts.

ACTIONS

I will fight to end public-sector teacher union collective bargaining agreements that:

*Require school staffing to be handled on a LIFO basis

*Prevent schools from rewarding top-performing teachers through incentive pay structures

*I will fight to allow parents to choose the very best schools for their children and establish funding rules that permit the tax dollars to follow the student to the schooling option of choice. The funding through tax dollars must be without "strings attached," so that the destination education program is not hampered in any way in providing the kind of education chosen by the parents for their students.

*I will fight to end the education bureaucracy that is a proven failure and return control of public education to the parents and the communities in which the schools reside.

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